Emma stepped onto the steel stairs of the Greyhound.
Looking forward, she gave her ticket to the bus driver. The middle-aged obese man in the grey workman's uniform looked at the teenager inquisitively.
"You running away, kid?" he asked.
Emma looked at him with tear-wrought eyes.
"No, just school. Minnesota; I have an aunt in Stillwater."
"Okee-dokee. You have everything?"
Emma turned her head and saw that the bus was absolutely abandoned. Of course no one would ride it; it had drenched in cheap 1980s purple décor. She walked down the aisle and took her seat at the back of the right row, adjacent to the toilet stall. She pushed her backpack into the overhead compartment as she chewed on a cookie in her mouth.
She did not lie. Indeed, she did have an aunt in Minnesota.
****
Emma's aunt, her late-father's sister, Claudette left Sublette County for the north to make a life for herself. Last Emma heard, Claudette wrote a gossip column for a city newspaper: The Examiner.
Inside her back pocket was her address she stole from her mother's address book.
"Here we go kid. Stilwater, one-way. We will be near Souix Falls by tomorrow night. Stops will be made in Casper and Wall Drug for rest and fuel," spoke the driver, in monotone, through the bus' scratchy intercom speakers.
"He sounds so official," Emma thought.
"Eastward 'ho!" He spoke with great cheer for the journey ahead.
Emma gave him a sarcastic thumbs-up and rested her head against the window. The engine revved.
Emma closed her eyes. Her hair bunched against the glass. Worry slowly drained out and finally her head became clear. She could feel the hurt melt away from her bones.
There was no fight and no struggle. After all this time, Emma thought clearly and reasonably.
Emma closed her eyes and snoozed.
*********
There existed a flat grassy plain, and a row of three door frames. No doors, and no walls in between. Only portals. The clouds overhead were blacker than shoe polish, and stricken with dinge grief.
Emma, standing in a frilly orange summer dress, looked at the empty door frames with a saddened feeling. Everything inside them was dead. Each one led to its own abyss of darkness.
She looked up.
A boxed loudspeaker lowered in from the stormy atmosphere and settled in front of Emma, as if it were carried by invisible angels. Her iPod touch was in her hand, and although no wires or receivers linked it to the speaker, she pressed "play", and Better Than Me by Hinder came on and trickled like water throughout her dream world. Out of pure imagination, daisy flowers popped from the group and vined around each door frame.
All three portals sparkled, and they became passageways as two very different figures stepped outside from their glittery realms.
Outside the left doorway stood an elderly man with face of a newborn.
"Who are you?" he asked Emma with an innocent and charitable tone.
Emma did not answer. She turned her head curiously to the right.
Outside the right doorway stood a young boy, around nine or ten, with a spoiled and hot-tempered attitude of a child given too much and little to no love.
"Who are you?" he asked Emma with a sourpuss face as he crossed his arms across his chest.
Emma did not answer. She curiously looked straight ahead.
